Solid Lipid Nanoparticles as Drug Delivery System for Water-Insoluble Drugs

Abstract

ABSTRACT − Solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) have emerged to combine the advantages of polymeric nanoparticles andlipid emulsions in early 1990s. SLNs can present several desirable properties derived from the solid state core. When for-mulating SLNs, there should be careful considerations about the physical state of the inner solid lipid core and its poly-morphism and supercooling behavior. In this review, SLNs were compared to lipid emulsion and emulsion of supercooledmelt to understand the unusual behaviors compared to lipid emulsions and to have insights into stability and release mech-anism. SLNs have been regarded as biocompatible system because lipids are usually well-tolerable ingredients than poly-mers. Several studies showed good tolerability of SLNs in terms of cytotoxicity and hemolysis. Similar to various othernanoparticulate drug delivery systems, SLNs can also change biodistribution of the incorporated drugs in a way to enhancetherapeutic effect. Most of all, large scale production of SLNs was extablished wihtout using organic solvents. Althoughthere is no SLN product in the market till date, several advantagious properties of SLNs and the progress we have seen sofar would make commercial product of SLNs possible before long and encourage research community to apply SLN-basedformulations for water-insoluble drugs. Key words